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September 08, 2013

FAQ: What is the COBIT framework's approach to IT management?The aim is to provide an overarching framework that incorporates different subsets of information management and control while promoting greater consistency among these areas. Unlike prescriptive requirements for a specific regulation, COBIT can be used for a wide range of enterprise needs, including information security, regulatory compliance, risk management and financial processing.

Criteria for Determining Which SaaS Platform to ChooseFor every SaaS entrepreneur in B2B, choosing the right platform is one of the first and most important decisions you will have to make. It will affect everything. To understand why it’s such a difficult task, I will review the three integrations of SalesClic, with both their upsides and downsides. So which platform would you have started with? With our application, we started with Google Apps, then integrated with Salesforce followed by Highrise.

The New Generation of Database Technology Includes Semantics and SearchIf you have a RDBMS running that’s giving you what you need, then you shouldn’t replace it just for the sake of it. Of course, if you want to combine your relational data with unstructured data or more complex structured data, then it can make sense to ingest it into MarkLogic so that you can benefit from unified search and query across all relevant data. Think of it as a data warehouse, but where you get to search and query all data instead of just pre-computed aggregates along predefined dimensions.

5 Ways A Flat Management Structure Can Empower Your BusinessIn a traditionally structured company, the low-level guys—such as customer support staff—are the people who truly have the pulse of a company. They’re the ones who are dealing with customers and who know everything that’s great and everything that’s not-so-great about a company. But if their experiences on the front lines inspire an idea, it’s virtually impossible for it to make its way to the CEO’s desk.

NSA Code-Cracking Puts Google Under Fire“This is a fundamental attack on how the Internet works,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior staff technologist at the Washington-based policy group Center for Democracy & Technology, said in an interview. “Secure communications technologies are the backbone of e-commerce” including the transfer of medical records and financial exchanges. “People in business will either not engage in those activities, or find other ways,” Hall said.

Minimizing Oracle db file sequential Read Wait EventsUnless you trace a session with the event 10046 or have a continuously running wait event data collector, it is difficult to determine the SQL statement that is responsible for the cumulated wait time. Take the preceding SID #192 again, for example. The 243113 centiseconds wait time may be caused by one long-running or many fast SQL statements. The latter case may not be an issue. Furthermore, the SQL statement that is currently running may or may not be the one that is responsible for the waits.

Outsourcing and TOGAF 9.1 - What is the connection?Enterprise Architecture (EA) is about developing a fundamental structure of your Business and IT components to respond to business drivers, realise business goals and establishing principles which will guide their evolution into the future. This includes core and non core components of IT and Business. When you outsource some of these components, whether they are parts of Business or IT, you need to ensure that the service provider delivers to the Enterprise Architecture of your company.

Dissecting DesignIn the past few years, we’ve recognized the danger in jumping headfirst into full-comp design before we really understand the design direction. Other disciplines have recognized this for a long time—think mood boards in branding—and taken steps to ramp up their design effort. The goal here is to establish the basic building blocks we’ll use in the rest of the design process: things like color, type, texture, illustration style, photography treatment, iconography. Once these are established, the success rate for the rest of the process is greatly increased. There are a number of ways to do this on the web; let’s look at a few.

Building a Cohesive Design TeamIn many organizations, skill building is a secondary activity, done only when project work is in a lull. However, amongst the most successful teams, it was a primary activity that was scheduled with the project work. One manager told us, When the [team members] come back from training jazzed to apply a new technique, that’s when we see real benefits. In order to bypass roles, the most successful teams would use techniques for facilitating discussions that equalized the power in the room.

Quote for the day:"Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today." -- Robert McKee